• This community needs YOUR help today. We rely 100% on Supporting Memberships to fund our efforts. With the ever increasing fees of everything, we need help. We need more Supporting Members, today. Please invest back into this community. I will ship a few decals too in addition to all the account perks you get.



    Sign up here: https://www.muzzleloadingforum.com/account/upgrades

WARNING!!!!!!!! there is a GOD!!!!Please read.

Muzzleloading Forum

Help Support Muzzleloading Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Guest
Folks,,, now I have been doing black powder for over 20 years and building and repairing for at least half of that. I think that I am pretty safe and now the dangers of black powder, old barrels and how to repair them, lets talk a bit about old barrels

Many times barrels that are 20 - to 30 years old have charges in them. Do yourself a favor and measure the depth of the bore before ever working on them. If you are working on a truly old barrels, say over 100 years and you find something
 
Captchee-

Glad that you came out of this one intact. I guess we all need a reminder now and again!
 
Interesting story and your point is well taken.

I'm wondering, as you said you had drilled thru the obstruction and could blow air thru it, do you think if you had poured soap and water thru the powder it would have neutralized the charges and flushed them out?

Then again, I don't know what effect soap and water have on smokeless powder. Maybe not much after you heat it with a torch.

I mention smokeless because I had bought a CVA Mountain Rifle at a gun show. When I got it home, I tested the barrel depth and sure enough, it was loaded with something.

I removed the nipple drum and looked inside.
Looking back at me were countless little cylinders of powder!
Some idiot had not only left the gun loaded, but had loaded it with smokeless powder.
I fished out all that I could and then pulled the ball to get rid of the rest.

Some people! :curse:
 
As you can imagine the two of us have discussed this a lot this evening and this is what we
think happened.
The load was very very old and compacted, to the point you could not push through it and it was almost like trying to get a ball puller screwed into a round ball.
This I think turned into over time into something like the solid fuel in a model rocket motor. Now when I soaked it in oil because of the compaction of the load it left a small part of good hard powder right on the breach face surrounded with oil soaked powder. When we cracked the breach the heat was all it took to set of a chain reaction that set of the load. IE the powder on the breach went, the oil soaked powder had started to dry and went causing enough movement in the load in the second barrel that it broke loose and did the same thing.
What we are thinking is we unknowingly had a load that
 
It's a good thing it didn't detonate or you might have had a grenade in your hands. Your angel was on duty...
 
I know what I would have done , right after I thanked the Lord........and it would have required a fresh pair of underwear and a dunk in the creek!!!!!Whew!!!! :eek:
 
Lucky it didn't go off while you were drilling the 1/4 inch holes... :eek:

Also, the person that sold it mailed a loaded gun!!!

If they don't know, then they should take it to a gunsmith prior to selling it!!!

It could have killed anyone while in route to you...
 
Musket
Yes they were mailed that way .
I would say that out of mmmm" 20 old Damascus muzzle loading barrels I have bought over the past few years probably 60% have had a charge in them, its not uncommon. However what is uncommon is that it went off after everything we had done.
Always assume a black powder anything is loaded, and if there is an obstruction in the barrel and the barrels don
 
Hello,
This may be a tall tale. An elderly man I know claims he and his brother had sneaked their grandfathers Civil War era rifle off of the mantle and were playing with it on the front porch of their home. This would have been in the early 1930s. He says they were using match heads and placing them on the nipple and snapping the hammer on the match heads. Sometimes the matches would spark or smoke. After several times of doing this the rifle fired and shot a large hole in the floor of their front porch. He claims no one had fired that rifle in over 50 years.
 
I would bet these charges were at the very least that old and I am guessing maybe pushing the 75 to 100 mark.
I am say that because of what shape the powder was in that was drilled our, it really just looked like rust and dirt.

I one time when I was first getting into building had an old fusil barrel I found at a yard sale. As I recall I got it for about 5 bucks. It had 3 loads in it stack on top of each other. Guy must have been in a scary position
 
If black powder is kept dry, it has a very long life. Dr. Francis Lord told a tale in his book "Civil War Collectors Encyclopedia" (1960?) of a couple in Virginia that had a summer cabin. On the property, they found a couple of cannon balls and had them placed on andirons for the fireplace. One fall evening, they built a fire and took a walk.When they returned, the wall where the fireplace was had been destroyed by the explosion of the cannon shot. True, or not? I can't say. but, it does show the dangers of "old gun parts" well. I've fired a couple of vintage rounds in my 1876 Winchester with no problems.
 
Tall tales maybe?? but we should take heed of them..

A friend of our family, went off to college.While there, He and two other guys, decided to share an apartment. They found a lil' old lady, who was renting out the top floor of her house. In this apartment/flat was a beautiful fireplace, that also had an old time muzzleloading Shotgun hanging over it..
One day, one of Greg's roomies, decided to take the gun down and look it over. he sats working the action and relaxing the hammers down using his thumb.. It just so happened, just as Greg passed in front of the barrels.. Joe's thumb slipped and the hammer fell on a supposedly bare
percussion cone.. You can imagine the rest!!

he survived, and is a single amputee, the doctors managed to save his other one.. but this was all caused by a careless moment.. and an Unloaded gun..

Not a tale..IT Happened!!!

Respect Always
Metalshaper
 
Another point to remember, is the literally tons of unexploded rounds that are still being found on the battle fields of Europe. The First World War stuff is reaching the century mark, and still deadly as ever. :shocking:
 
Don't meddle with old unloaded firearms. They are the most deadly and unerring things that have ever been created by man. You don't have to take any pains at all with them; you don't have to have a rest, you don't have to have any sights on the gun, you don't have to take aim, even. No, you just pick out a relative and bang away, and you are sure to get him. A youth who can't hit a cathedral at thirty yards with a Gatling gun in three-quarters of an hour, can take up an old empty musket and bag his mother every time at a hundred. Think what Waterloo would have been if one of the armies had been boys armed with old rusty muskets supposed not to be loaded, and the other army had been composed of their female relations. The very thought of it makes me shudder.

Mark Twain - Advice to Youth speech, 4/15/1882
 
Back
Top